Humor & Life Quote by Margaret Cho

Margaret Cho turns exhaustion into a punchline, then sharpens it into a boundary. “People drain me” sounds like a confession, but it lands like a verdict: intimacy isn’t automatically nourishing, even when it’s wrapped in the language of friendship. The provocative kicker - “the best state in the union” - is classic Cho misdirection, borrowing patriotic boosterism to sell something socially suspect: solitude. By framing loneliness as a place you can “live in,” she treats it less like a symptom and more like an address, a chosen jurisdiction with its own rights and protections.

The subtext is about emotional labor and the performance tax that comes with being the funny one, the outspoken one, the person everyone assumes can take more. Cho’s career has been built on turning private pain into public material; that transaction can make any room feel like work. The line quietly rebukes the expectation that closeness equals constant access. Even “the closest of friends” can behave like an audience, asking for energy, reassurance, stories, and a version of you that stays on.

Context matters: Cho is a comedian who has long spoken about identity, scrutiny, and survival in a culture that consumes marginalized voices for entertainment and moral instruction. In that light, “loneliness” isn’t melodrama; it’s recovery time. The joke works because it refuses sentimentality. It lets solitude be a power move, not a defeat, and it dares the listener to admit they’ve wanted the same thing.